Recently, people have begun to automate the task of designing world wide web pages. Various software programs exist that allow people to define the appearance of a web page. Users on the world wide web can then view the defined page using browser software. In general, when viewed with a browser, the defined page will appear as it was defined. A problem develops, however, when certain types of web pages are displayed on certain hardware platforms on using certain browser options.
These problems are due, primarily to differences between hardware platforms and to the user changing various default browser options. As an example of hardware platform differences, 10 point text displayed in an operating system such as MICROSOFT WINDOWS 95 is the same size as 10 point text on the APPLE MACINTOSH operating system. Thus, for example, if a block of text on a web page is defined to be 10 point type, it will take up less space on the screen of a browser running on a MACINTOSH than it will take up when displayed by a browser executing on an IBM PC.
As a further example, some browsers allow the user to set the size at which text is displayed in a web page. If the user sets the text to be larger or smaller than usual, this affects how much screen space is needed to display the text. As a further example, not all text fonts take up the same amount of room, even when they are technically the same type size. Because certain browsers allow the user to specify the font used to display text, the text of web pages displayed by the browser may take up more or less room than was intended by the human designer of the page.
Given the current state of browsers, the human designer of a web page has no control over how various browsers executing on different platforms will display text. Similarly, the human designer has no control over whether a user changes the size or the font of text on his web page. Thus, even though the human designer may carefully design the layout of his web page, the layout will not appear as planned under certain circumstances. What is needed is a way to let the human designer plan his page in such a way that the effects of the above problems are minimized.